...Some of the best years of my life were spent on Solid Gold. Here's a great photo of all of us from the 1984 Solid Gold Dancers Calendar: 24 Karats of Heat:

I'm second from the left. That's my Eye of the Tiger face. I used to make that one when I wanted people to know, "Hey. I don't explain myself through words. I explain myself through the intense heat of my dance moves." If you saw that face, it meant you were about to see an explosion of dance, leaving heavy casualties of anyone in the room unprepared for the ensuing heat.

They were good times, but they weren't to last. Gabriel (upper right) soon became jealous of my heat. He'd talk about me behind my back to the other girls, saying my Sailor Step lunges "weren't Solid Gold caliber." Anyone who'd ever seen me Sailor Step would have laughed right in his face, but I held my tongue. The girls knew Gabriel was just bitter I'd landed the role of Jesus on Solid Gold's 1986 Easter Weekend Dance Spectacular.

Eventually Gabriel became too hard to ignore. I'd show up at dance practice to find he'd drunk all my Fresca. More and more often I'd find myself talking to his hand instead of his face—telling me on a subconscious level that while I might think my moves were all that, he knew this wasn't the case.

The final straw came in March 1986, when Gabriel broke into my locker and shit in my leg-warmers. Despite his claims, I was convinced it had been no accident. I was furious, and stormed into the rehearsal studio, interrupting him mid-routine. He dropped Chantelle and glared at me.

"Gabriel," I said, giving him all trillion mega-watts of the Eye of the Tiger. "You and I are settling this the only way we can: through the awesome all-consuming heat of Solid Gold dance. Outside."

Gabriel may be a bad person, but his dance moves are ridiculously intense; Modern Tap Magazine awarded him Most Jazz-Flavored Passion three years in a row. As I walked out into the street, I admit I was worried. Were my moves dangerous enough?

Gabriel went right for the throat, pulling out all his signature moves, each one containing more raw heat than the last. His One Man Conga Line segued into a Sugar Foot Funk/Shorty George medley, then a Graham technique version of a Mashed Potato/Funky Chicken with rond de jambe accents. He finished with 50 flawless Primitive Squat pirouettes.

If I was going to beat him, I would have to break out my secret reserve stash of dance passion.

"How about it, Tad?" Gabriel taunted, massaging his calf muscles. "Are you going to bring the heat, or am I wasting my time?"

Nobody questions my heat. I opened with a ferocious move I invented called Chocolate Fury. It has some extremely intense and hot steps, mostly urban dance peppered with développé battement, ball changes and jazz hands.

Gabriel looked worried. Filling with confidence, I segued into another original, Shake 'n' Breakin', which looks like this:

Gabriel started to sweat. I was winning. Flush with victory, I finished off with the most complicated move in the history of Solid Gold dance: Welcome To Planet Phunk, Please Have Your Tickets Ready To Get Busy. It was during this final move, where I went from a Brazilian Shimmy/Snake combo, did a Barrel Jump into a Pelvic Lumberjack Hipbuster, dabbled a little Coffee Grinder hot sauce onto a Pirouette fouetté with the front leg in plié, then pivot-stepped into a Funky Four Corner Toe Fan/Quick Heel Split that I felt the pop.

I'd sprained my ankle a little.

I would never dance again.

...I was born in a small California mining town on the outskirts of Los Angeles. While other children played tag, I practiced my grand jétés and pirouettes with the crowd's roar in my ears. In the summer of '68 I got a paper route, saving up enough to buy my first headband. I would spend hours alone in my room, contemplating how to make my moves dangerous.

My father, a simple man who worked in the nearby mines, did not approve of my big-city dance dreams. Every day he would wake before dawn and, while the rest of us slept, trudge two miles to the coal mines. As Chief Dance Specialist for Mine #34, it was his responsibility to keep miners' spirits high for those long 16 hour days.

At night, long after the sun had set, he would drag himself home, wracked with exhaustion from a day of urban dance, salsa, tap and jazz freestyle. Stopping only to kiss my mother tenderly and take a bite of cold food from the table, he'd then go to bed to sketch ideas for the next day's routine.

When I told my father I wanted be a Hollywood dancer, he moonwalked over to me and picked me up by my collar. "No son of mine will dance on television!" he boomed. "It's a waste of your God-given tiger-passion dance heat. You will come with me to the coal mines and learn what real dancing is."

The next morning I followed my Father to Mine #34, where I would learn to be a man.

The conditions were grueling, the hours long. We would ride an elevator down the main shaft some two hundred yards below the surface. There, lit by dim flickering lights, the men would break rocks looking for coal deposits, and my Father and I would dance to scorching hot dance hits blasting from a nearby boom box.

Before long my father and I had completely redone his routine. We became so in tune with each other's style that he'd barely go down on all fours before I'd run at his back, flip off of it and land with jazz hands waving at either side of my face to the indifference of the miners. Our talents were wasted on them. My heart once again looked to the big city. I could feel L.A. beckoning me, flushing my face with its dance heat. It seemed hopeless.

A stroke of luck hit in May 1983 when Mine Shaft #34 collapsed, killing 12 and trapping 10 others. My Father and I returned home early for the first time since I'd started years before, joining my mother and sisters in front of the television.

That night I first heard about a show called Solid Gold. The next morning I packed my few belongings into a stylish low-slung Prada satchel and stole into the night.

I would never see my family again.

...it's a question I'm asked so often, by so many different people. "How do you manage to look so ferocious, like a tiger is ferocious?" This is hard to answer—my Eye of the Tiger face took years to perfect.

Note the bared finger-claws (right). If you're wondering how the photographer somehow got a wild jungle animal to wear a belly shirt, legwarmers and hotpants, then jump on cue, you aren't the first. But The Eye of the Tiger didn't come easily.

When I first joined Solid Gold I naturally took to the dance like a tiger to jungle passion. But the results of my first few photoshoots were mortifying. My poses weren't tiger-like at all. They had no intensity and only negligible amounts of jungle heat. Somehow I had to learn how to transfer my dance heat into pose heat, then hold that intensity so that it could be captured on film.

It was impossible. I soon became suicidal.

Things would have gone badly if it hadn't been for Ace, the other male Solid Gold dancer at the time (my nemesis Gabriel would eventually replace him in 86). It was Ace who first showed me how to "cage the tiger" by making claws with my hands. He also showed me how to make my eyes look dangerous, so people would look at me and be terrified. I trained my eyes to be like a tiger's; to tell a viewer instantly: "Look out. My moves are incredibly feverish."

My Eye of the Tiger face was born, allowing me to pack incredible amounts of heat into my moves. But the other dancers became worried for my safety.

"You've made your moves too hot, Tad," they'd warn. But I was I was young and stupid, and too caught up in my fame. With the benefit of hindsight, I'd like to apologize to anyone I may have injured through the intensity of my Solid Gold dance.

Ace left us in November 1985, in a hip roll/arm spiral combo gone tragically awry. But if a man can be judged by his legacy, Ace's candle will flame through the ages.

In 1985 we toured Europe for the first time. Solid Gold Mania had overtaken England, and we were mobbed on the streets. The biggest fashion then was a sleeveless gold spandex vest and dance tights. Everyone wanted to be Tad Jackson. The pressure was enormous, and I admit that around this time I started to experiment with illegal dance moves. Debbie caught me doing Lambada, the Forbidden Dance, in the shower room before a show.

"You're playing a dangerous game, Tad," she said, concern in her eyes.

"I know what I'm doing!" I yelled, tossing my hair gel across the room...